This thread has me seriously considering signing up for a month or two. One question:
I'm looking at the Essential Media Group label and there's a lot of interesting-looking stuff there. Are they one of those shady, grey-area labels who put out "reissues" of previous materials? Can anyone recommend anything there for an old-skool jazz fan?
Hi All. I am the lead developer of mTraks and just wanted to thank you for the positive comments on our recent facelift. We hope it is easier to use and more engaging. We will continue to improve it and add new releases. Please use the feedback tab to report any problems or suggest improvements for how we can make it easier to find the music you love. Also, please note that links to content on the old system no longer work. If you want I can translate the previous finds here and repost them for your convenience.
Welcome stsmith! I'll definitely give feedback on anything I run into.
As for reposting the above links, I'm certainly not going to say no thanks if you have the time and inclination, but I think (or at least hope!) we can find them on a search if we are intrigued by a particular album. So don't waste what time you have that isn't already dedicated to working out any kinks in the new site on us!
@stsmith, thanks for checking in. The new interface is nice, and now that it's up and stable has been working great. The search process is a VAST improvement. One small thing I'm missing is the indicator at the top of how many credits I have left. Takes a couple of clicks to get to that now, whereas before it was right up by the login email. It would be useful to be able to see this more conveniently. I also noticed that the "download" buttons no longer change color when a download is started, which on a larger album had me doing a lot of checking back and forth to see which track I'd got to in my download progression.
I appreciate that Mtraks needed a facelift, and I may be in the minority, but the new site functions extremely poorly for me. As I said in an earlier post, I'm thinking about joining, but performance issues are giving me pause. Specifically:
Clicking on "What's Hot" produces a page whose only content consists of, "We were not able to compute for the most popular albums. Check out what's new instead."
Pages that contain a long list of albums (like What's New, label pages or genre pages) can't be sorted by album, artist name or popularity.
No option to increase/decrease number of albums displayed per page.
I'm not seeing a way to sample all tracks on an album ON the album's page.
Overall, site performance is slow, slower and slowest. I'm using the latest version of Firefox for a Mac.
Did I mention it's slow? Loading a page of African albums, for examples, produces my Mac's spinning rainbow color wheel of death.
@anose, @Germanprof, @cafreema - Thanks for your suggestions. We're off for a long weekend but we'll get back to enhancements next week and will carefully consider your input. Search is an area we'll be looking at a lot. Also I know FF on Mac/Linux is slow laying out pages with lots of albums. Will do. Bye for now.
I'm getting the Accout Not Confirmed so you can't sign in status. Can't also control the account, so it will be interesting to see if they renew my monthly. No response from customer service. Like the design change and all, but I'm in the Doofy boat right now.
Sort, if you're out there...I wound up having to re-sign up using a different e-mail address. This appears to be related to the fact that I never "verified" my e-mail from my trial long ago. Once I signed up with the new e-mail, all was copacetic. Support was friendly and fairly prompt. Do contact them...they made a point of confirming cancellation of the old acct so it wouldn't be charged.
Spent my 30 on:
Pretty good for $10, plus they have Pi Recordings, which eMu does not.
Thanks - I'll take another thirty free credits. I have my download list lined up as well. That Apex album's wonderful, though I have to be in the mood for sax meets sitar. Top album's great too - both have strong replay value.
I'm looking at the Essential Media Group label and there's a lot of interesting-looking stuff there. Are they one of those shady, grey-area labels who put out "reissues" of previous materials? Can anyone recommend anything there for an old-skool jazz fan?
EMG looks like a valid label. They have a regular functioning website, and they list many of the big players under their Licensing page, which indicates to me they cherry pick titles from the big boys they think they can distribute digitally at a cheap price and still turn a profit on.
Excited to find new album by this collaboration of young all-stars at mtraks. It's not at eMu yet.
mTraks customer service has treated me right since sign-on difficulties last month. Unless I'm missing something, tracks really have to be DL'd one at a time...you can't even DL a whole album.
Jonah, thanks for the advice. I'll start loading my wishlist with some EMG goodies.
So I finally signed up for my 30 freebies and grabbed:
Finn Riggins, "vs. Wilderness." I highly recommend it for anyone who likes Built to Spill, especially "Perfect from Now On." Many of the tracks sound like they could be outtakes from that album. But their songs also have a bit of their own sound, too, especially "Dali," the standout track.
Wheedle's Groove. This is a collection of 70s soul and funk from Seattle. Perfect for all you crate diggers out there.
As for MTraks as a service: gotta say, I am less than impressed. They have a wishlist, but no way to directly add an album to it. You have to "purchase" the album, go to your checkout page, then move the album from checkout to wishlist. Ugh.
And no download manager?!!!!! "Wheedle's Groove is 21 tracks, and I had to click on each track individually. Double ugh.
Finally, I used up my free 30 tracks almost immediately, but I have to wait two weeks to activate my paid account so I can download 75 more (I signed up for the $19.99 plan). Why can't I start my paid subscription now?
Yeah, it's cheap and ugly. On the other hand the download manager doesn't cost you a day and a night with customer service and screw up your files. And it's cheap.
It's cheap and ugly, and right now, I'm also not allowed to purchase anything, saying I don't have permission to use my credits. Literally. Weird. I like the site and all, but this is now the second major hurdle from what the site is designed for: getting music.
Anyone having issues here? My subscription was supposed to renew today, but no credits and subscription page is blank. You can now sell your soul for Mtrak credits on Facebook similar to Guvera.
Hm, not a member myself, but I actually came on board just to mention that I noticed a bunch of my jazz recs are showing up on mtracks. The excellent Mark Weinstein "El Cumbanchero" was the latest I noticed, but many others, too, including Goran Kajfes.
I am assembling quite a list of jazz recent reccs/best of 2011s, etc, on mTraks. I'm supposed to reload this week, will post my little menu of picks soon. It will amount to 4 or 5 new albums for 15 bucks.
Alternatively, if you want to see what I've been DL'ing on mTraks, check their "most popular" page. Approx half of them are albums I have purchased...all it takes is one, it would seem!
@sort, I had a problem last month with not getting any credits when my sub renewed. I emailed CS and they said they are still having bugs with their new system (perhaps they wanted to keep up with emusic, lol), and they fixed it in a coupe of days.
@Doofy, I noticed the instant effect on popularity when I bought things as well. It's possible they have enough albums and few enough subscribers that downloading one album makes a difference (an instructive parallel: my author dashboard on Amazon told me last month that one of my earlier books from 10 years ago sold 3 copies in the previous month, and that was enough for it to climb 358,000 places in the Amazon sales rankings). It's also possible that we don;t all see the same "most popular" albums, but that that feature on their site has some adaptation to the user built in. Jonah, I understand google is also adaptive - it shows search results based on your past behavior, so your googling of the blogs may possibly have moved them up the rankings for you but not necessarily everyone else. (I'm told it's a potential issue for students using Google for research, since it means you are likely to get pages like ones you have visited before which may keep you from finding sources that are off your beaten path)
Oh, I see. No, I didn't mean that musicians I rec are moving up in mtracks rankings... only that I've noticed that those musicians are available on mtracks and I thought I'd pass along the word that these albums can be purchased there.
However, I would expect that all rankings (and not just mtracks) would self-adjust based on my recommendations. All eyes are on my blog. Remember, the Bird is the Worm.
I'll draw everyone in with my lure. The whole world will be jazz fanatics before I'm through.
No, I didn't mean that - I was talking across threads because the topic connected. I was referring to you moving your blog up the google rankings. On the other hand birdistheworm is an unusual string - the top 8 hits I get for it are your blog.
Oh, yes! Well, let me brag for a minute as Tech Grandpa tells you what he figured out all on his own.
Well, at first I was sticking to my plan of making AAJ's googlebot spider work for me by constantly searching on musician names that appear in my blog and hoping that google would begin to associate them with my blog url in my sig line. But that seemed like specious reasoning. It would make google recognize my blog name, but only as far as a google search on BitW, and not, say, Rafal Sarnecki. Well, then I was struck with the epiphany that it made much more sense to search on my site, so I searched around and found a way to insert a search box on BitW. Then I searched like mad. It wasn't long after that google started picking up my blog on various musician related key words.
However, I think once I began embedding music players into my articles, that pretty much cinched it. I mean, those players are constantly talking back and forth to the original site, and google sure as shit is gonna notice that.
I'm pretty pleased with google's grasp of my site at this point.
I think once I enroll in that Amazon retailers linking plan thing, that'll also boost my google reach, too.
But we'll see. I'm figuring so much of this stuff out on the fly with not a lot of background experience.
Interesting. Glad I downloaded yesterday, because this would anger me if it was today.
For anyone interested, I noticed yesterday that the new Guided By Voices is there. For reasons that elude me I've never been a fan (they should be right up my alley), but I know lots of people love them.
I'm DLing right now. Did have my deeply unsatisfying moment when I quit and the next day got noticed that I had restarted my account and was charged. Then they said they fixed it, gave me a refund, but then said I would have to manually quit again. Then when I went back to quit, I saw they had charged me again. Ugh. They don't have enough labels I love to keep a steady 75 going every month, so I certainly hope they can figure out how to keep people jumping back in.
Comments
Dreamtime Submersible by Evan Marc. Review here
I'm looking at the Essential Media Group label and there's a lot of interesting-looking stuff there. Are they one of those shady, grey-area labels who put out "reissues" of previous materials? Can anyone recommend anything there for an old-skool jazz fan?
Currently listening to The FMs
As for reposting the above links, I'm certainly not going to say no thanks if you have the time and inclination, but I think (or at least hope!) we can find them on a search if we are intrigued by a particular album. So don't waste what time you have that isn't already dedicated to working out any kinks in the new site on us!
Craig
I appreciate that Mtraks needed a facelift, and I may be in the minority, but the new site functions extremely poorly for me. As I said in an earlier post, I'm thinking about joining, but performance issues are giving me pause. Specifically:
Clicking on "What's Hot" produces a page whose only content consists of, "We were not able to compute for the most popular albums. Check out what's new instead."
Pages that contain a long list of albums (like What's New, label pages or genre pages) can't be sorted by album, artist name or popularity.
No option to increase/decrease number of albums displayed per page.
I'm not seeing a way to sample all tracks on an album ON the album's page.
Overall, site performance is slow, slower and slowest. I'm using the latest version of Firefox for a Mac.
Did I mention it's slow? Loading a page of African albums, for examples, produces my Mac's spinning rainbow color wheel of death.
Is there any chance that search by label will be restored? Label searches tend to be an important way that we here at emusers explore new music.
Have a great weekend!
Spent my 30 on:
Pretty good for $10, plus they have Pi Recordings, which eMu does not.
EMG looks like a valid label. They have a regular functioning website, and they list many of the big players under their Licensing page, which indicates to me they cherry pick titles from the big boys they think they can distribute digitally at a cheap price and still turn a profit on.
I say, go for it.
Cheers.
Excited to find new album by this collaboration of young all-stars at mtraks. It's not at eMu yet.
mTraks customer service has treated me right since sign-on difficulties last month. Unless I'm missing something, tracks really have to be DL'd one at a time...you can't even DL a whole album.
So I finally signed up for my 30 freebies and grabbed:
Finn Riggins, "vs. Wilderness." I highly recommend it for anyone who likes Built to Spill, especially "Perfect from Now On." Many of the tracks sound like they could be outtakes from that album. But their songs also have a bit of their own sound, too, especially "Dali," the standout track.
Wheedle's Groove. This is a collection of 70s soul and funk from Seattle. Perfect for all you crate diggers out there.
As for MTraks as a service: gotta say, I am less than impressed. They have a wishlist, but no way to directly add an album to it. You have to "purchase" the album, go to your checkout page, then move the album from checkout to wishlist. Ugh.
And no download manager?!!!!! "Wheedle's Groove is 21 tracks, and I had to click on each track individually. Double ugh.
Finally, I used up my free 30 tracks almost immediately, but I have to wait two weeks to activate my paid account so I can download 75 more (I signed up for the $19.99 plan). Why can't I start my paid subscription now?
Alternatively, if you want to see what I've been DL'ing on mTraks, check their "most popular" page. Approx half of them are albums I have purchased...all it takes is one, it would seem!
@Doofy, I noticed the instant effect on popularity when I bought things as well. It's possible they have enough albums and few enough subscribers that downloading one album makes a difference (an instructive parallel: my author dashboard on Amazon told me last month that one of my earlier books from 10 years ago sold 3 copies in the previous month, and that was enough for it to climb 358,000 places in the Amazon sales rankings). It's also possible that we don;t all see the same "most popular" albums, but that that feature on their site has some adaptation to the user built in. Jonah, I understand google is also adaptive - it shows search results based on your past behavior, so your googling of the blogs may possibly have moved them up the rankings for you but not necessarily everyone else. (I'm told it's a potential issue for students using Google for research, since it means you are likely to get pages like ones you have visited before which may keep you from finding sources that are off your beaten path)
However, I would expect that all rankings (and not just mtracks) would self-adjust based on my recommendations. All eyes are on my blog. Remember, the Bird is the Worm.
I'll draw everyone in with my lure. The whole world will be jazz fanatics before I'm through.
Well, at first I was sticking to my plan of making AAJ's googlebot spider work for me by constantly searching on musician names that appear in my blog and hoping that google would begin to associate them with my blog url in my sig line. But that seemed like specious reasoning. It would make google recognize my blog name, but only as far as a google search on BitW, and not, say, Rafal Sarnecki. Well, then I was struck with the epiphany that it made much more sense to search on my site, so I searched around and found a way to insert a search box on BitW. Then I searched like mad. It wasn't long after that google started picking up my blog on various musician related key words.
However, I think once I began embedding music players into my articles, that pretty much cinched it. I mean, those players are constantly talking back and forth to the original site, and google sure as shit is gonna notice that.
I'm pretty pleased with google's grasp of my site at this point.
I think once I enroll in that Amazon retailers linking plan thing, that'll also boost my google reach, too.
But we'll see. I'm figuring so much of this stuff out on the fly with not a lot of background experience.
Cheers.
For anyone interested, I noticed yesterday that the new Guided By Voices is there. For reasons that elude me I've never been a fan (they should be right up my alley), but I know lots of people love them.
Craig